Surrogate mom accused of telling couples their babies died, and then selling them

A French woman who swindled several gay couples out of tens of thousands of dollars after claiming their surrogate babies had died will have her day in court.

Commercial surrogacy is illegal in France. But that didn’t stop the woman, named only as Aurore, from using creative pseudonyms like “little stork” and “sincere angel” to sign contracts with couples desperate to have children.

Her scheme was pretty simple and involved two different gay couples but the same baby.

Here’s what happened: Aurore signed a contract with Couple A, agreeing to carry their child for an upfront payment of €15,000. But as her due date approached, she sent the men a text message saying the baby was stillborn.

Victims of the scheme learned their baby was dead via text.

Unbeknownst to Couple A, Aurore had also signed a contract with Couple B, in which she agreed to sell them Couple A’s child, who they believed belonged to Aurore, for €10,000.

When the scheme proved successful, Aurore did it again, this time to a gay couple and a straight couple, taking €15,000 from the gay couple to carry their child, texting them to say the baby was dead, and then selling the infant to an unsuspecting straight couple for €10,000.

Aurore was eventually caught and arrested in 2013. At the time, she confessed to police that she was in the process of swindling three more couples, and was charged with fraud and attempted fraud.

She tried saying that the reason she did it was because she had been raped by her father as a teenager, and so she suffered from “major emotional neglect.”

She is now heading to trial. If convicted, prosecutors are seeking a sentence of one year in jail with nine months suspended. Meanwhile, her clients are all being charged with “incitement to the abandonment of children,” which carries a fine of €2,000 each.